OK this is an idea that I have been mulling over for some time. And after watching the success of one such project on kickstarter, I thought I would toss it out there.
What about an engineer/developer of the future that is basically a gun-for-hire, but not by one company at a time, but a crowdsource project? What do I mean. Well if you look at the kickstarter project LiveCode you see a gent whom is basically getting paid to write a fancy IDE that more common folk could use to write games for phone (cross platform too). And the project is opensource so everyone can get it. So what about smaller projects? Perhaps you work a a company that has a project that is underfunded, uses some opensource, you go out and get the funds from individuals or those other companies and release the results free to the community?
Well its an idea. Issues I see is unsexy projects, or folks not seeing this as a donation, but more of an owner.